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George - from reading your questions - I see you have learned this lesson as well. Agreed, no one answer -I turned the question to be a wiki :)
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Tal GaliliJul 1 '10 at 15:41

Looking at this again - I don't understand why this was closed...
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Tal GaliliJun 9 '11 at 16:37

No idea, should be reopened. Post it to Meta.
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ripper234Jan 5 '12 at 9:23

12 Answers
12

MovieLens is a research project at the University of Minnesota that gives movie recommendations based on your ratings of other movies.
I believe it was one of the first collaborative filtering systems, created over 10 years ago.

These are nice, but the "smart" recommendation systems, which ask you to rate other movies (or whatever) first to figure out what you might like, are much better. Think about it: Movie reviewers often score based on factors like their reputation and how few people they expect to see a movie, not just whether the film was good or not.
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MGOwenNov 3 '10 at 0:44

So what service does offer a smart recommendation system based on YOUR OWN ratings?
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ShimmyJan 10 at 23:56

You already mentioned Imdb Top 250 but in general the whole site is very useful and I find the User Rating pretty accurate. I tend to like movies that get good marks and dislike the ones with bad marks. In some cases I had to disagree, mostly because I found films with low marks better than expected.
Another great site is Roger Ebert's who makes short and well founded reviews of most popular films.

It's a recommendation tool by way of ranking your favorite films via movie matchups. It keeps track of your preferences and the movies you haven't seen yet, while automatically building a list of your favorites movies and a list of the best movies you've never seen.

The "recommendations" (using some sort of algorithm I assume) are not great, but they have a meta-ranking on top of IMDB that shows unseen top movies which you can then filter down by genre/year/taste/your social circle, etc.

Combined with the straightforward way to track what movies you want to watch and the ability to see where you can access these movies now online (Hulu, Netflix, etc) it's a winner.